277: Holly Worton ~ How to Create Authentic & Organic Connections Online

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today I’m talking about creating authentic, organic connections online. I’m going through a massive social media detox: I’m unfollowing people when I can’t remember who they are or why I followed them in the first place, and I’m unfollowing people who focus on business or coaching, mostly because I’m trying to train my brain away from those topics and toward my writing.

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What You’ll Learn

How to re-evaluate how you use social media
What to declutter + when to do it
How often you need to re-evaluate your strategy

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

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Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 277. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about creating authentic and organic connections online.

This is inspired by recent events in my life, as you know I have gone through a lot of changes in my business, changes in my focus, and it inspired me to start doing some decluttering, and rethinking, of how I use social media, and how I use it to network and connect with people online. So, I thought I would share that with you.

Now, before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to say a massive thank you to new patron, Debbie, and thank you so much for joining us in Patreon, I really appreciate your support. And if you have been thinking of joining us on Patreon, I would love for you to head over to: http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton and join us there. Membership starts at just $1 a month and you get exclusive access to stuff I don’t share anything else. Also, I have finally archived the Facebook group, which means that the only place to join any kind of community with me, that I am leading, is on Patreon. So, Facebook is shifting to Patreon and I would love to see you there.

Now, this episode is kind of reminiscent of a couple of pieces of content I have done before, that I wanted to reference here, because I know I have mentioned them a lot. So, back in 2015, when I was going through changes in business and life, I wrote this blogpost called: Do you feel allergic to social media? This might be why. And, I kind of went through a description of things that I went through that I was experiencing in terms of just really feeling allergic to social media, and I had been feeling that way for about six months before I wrote this blogpost. And I realised it was because I was going through a lot of deep, inner processes and going within a lot, and doing a lot of deep inner work and that mean that I really didn’t feel like being out on social media a lot, and putting myself out there and being visible, because I was doing so much inner work. I was finding it really challenging to balance that sense of inner work, and outer visibility. So I wrote that blog post and that is one of my most-viewed blog posts, I have got a couple of comments on the post, but I have had even more people actually write emails to me and say: thank you so much for that, I have been going through the same thing and I didn’t understand it. And I think there is so much pressure to be visible whether that’s for business reasons, or personal reasons, or whatever, but social media is such a massive part of our lives now that it has been around 10+ years, it has become a normal part of life for most people. Now I do have some friends, I do know some people who aren’t on social media at all, or who are very, very, limited on how they put themselves on social media, but I think most of the people listening to this podcast are probably fairly active online. So, I think it is important if you have ever been feeling that you just don’t want to be online or you just don’t want to put yourself out there or you haven’t been either posting your own stuff, or looking at other peoples stuff, I think it is worth taking some time to stop and reevaluate how you use social media, and how you want to use social media and why you are using social media, so you can figure out what you want instead.

So, it was back in 2015 that I wrote that blog post, and then earlier this year, March 5th of 2018, I produced episode 241 of this podcast, which was called: what to do when you are sick of social media. So, as you can see {laughing}, I have gone through some phases in my life when I am really sick of social media, and I have always found those moments really confusing, because social media used to be such a big thing for me, my business was based around helping people learn how to use social media. So, in this episode, 241 of the podcast, I talked about what to do when you are sick of using social media, how to market your business instead; questions that you need to ask yourself to help you get clarity of what is going on for you; how to reduce the noise of social media, and the notifications that can drive us crazy; things that you might give yourself permission to do differently on social media and how to get help with social media; and by that I don’t mean hiring a social media manager, there are other ways to get help with how you use social media. So, that, I think, was a really useful episode for me, and also for listeners based on feedback that I received about it. So, I am linking to both that blog post and the episode 241 in the ShowNotes for this episode, but as usual you can get that episode by going to: http://HollyWorton.com/241.

So, here we are. I have been going through a massive social media detox and declutter, so I have been unfollowing people, when I can’t remember who they are or why I followed them in the first place, I have just going through and rethinking how I post, and the things that I post. So, I wanted to share with you more about what exactly I have been doing in case you may want to do something similar, because I think decluttering is really important and I think it is a good thing to do, and I think reevaluating our strategy is a good thing to do, on a regular basis. So, it started on Instagram, I started going through my Instagram and realising, of course, with the current Instagram algorithm, I don’t see a lot of stuff from people that I want to see, it has become like Facebook where they only post stuff, or you only see on your feed stuff from the people that you most often engage with. And of course that’s a downward spiral because when I don’t see someone’s posts, I don’t comment on them, or like them, and so that means I see less and less of them and so it comes to the point where I think: oh, I haven’t heard from so-and-so in so long and so I will go in and I will search for them, on either Facebook, or Instagram, and I will realise: oh they have been quite active, I just haven’t seen any of their posts. So, I went through Instagram and I started unfollowing people and then started seeing more of what I wanted to see in my feed. It has kind of been a slow process, I unfollowed a bunch of people and then did it again, and recently, since I have made this decision to let go of my business and the business mindset stuff and focus more on my books, I have started unfollowing people that are very coach-y, business-related, because I want to disconnect my brain from that world. I have tried to stay in touch, and not unfollow or disconnect from people that I know, and that I am friends with, but sometimes I have made mistakes, so if I have unfollowed you please don’t take it personally, it might just be because I am trying to disconnect from the coaching and business world; it might be because I hit the wrong button and unfollowed the wrong person, I had to kind of unfollow and follow people, because I go through these kind of fast. So, I have been doing that on Instagram.

Then I went to Facebook, and I started un-liking a bunch of Facebook pages that I just didn’t want to see, or unfollowing them, if I didn’t want to unlike them, and then today I did a bunch of that on Twitter, I did a bunch of unfollowing of people that I just thought: I have no idea who these people are, I have never engaged with them, they have never engaged with me, I am really not interested in their posts and I unfollowed a bunch of people. On Twitter I am following over 3400 I think, still, so there is more decluttering that needs to be done on Twitter, but it feels really good to start cleaning up my feed and start cleaning up the stuff that I see online. And I realise I have been ignoring my feed, I will go onto Facebook and I will post my own stuff, sporadically, not very often, but I do post my own stuff, and I do go into groups, but I haven’t looked at my Facebook feed for a really long time. Occasionally, I will just through and ‘like’ a couple of things, but I really haven’t been going through it, so I have not been paying attention to what other people have been posting there in a long time. And, same goes for Twitter, I have been even less active on Twitter, and that’s a shame, because I always really liked Twitter, I think I I have been on it since 2007, and it is something that I always really liked; and I know a lot of people don’t get Twitter or they don’t like Twitter, and that’s absolutely fine, you do not need to be on every social network, but I used to really like it. And same with Instagram, I was posting a lot of my stuff but not necessarily going through my feed and looking at other peoples stuff. So, I’m hoping that by decluttering my feed, and unfollowing the people that are not necessarily relevant to what I want to be focussing on right now, that I will be able to keep in touch with the people that I want to keep in touch with.

So, that’s kind of one-half of the decluttering I have been doing, and that’s following and unfollowing other people. The other half of the decluttering I have been doing is how I have been posting on social media, and this is something that I have kind of mentioned before about how uncomfortable I was with how I was using social media and yet I wasn’t making changes, until very recently. So, I have been blogging since 2006, blogging on my current website since 2011; and I have lot of content, this is episode 277 of the podcast, I have got videos, I have blog posts, I have got so much stuff. And I had used, I have been using, I still haven’t cancelled my subscription to it, but I have been using MeetEdgar since it came out, to post most of my content. And what I have loved about Edgar is that you upload all of your content, your posts, you have to do it manually, but once you have got the old stuff in there you can create feeds to kind of grab the new stuff, so it is a great way to have a catalogue of all your different types of your content, so that you can share it on all your different social networks, and it is really, really, fantastic system if you have got a great catalogue of content. However, I found that I was totally reliant on Edgar to post a ton of stuff on social media and I wasn’t actually going on there to engage with people, I think mainly because I was feeling that extended allergy to social media. So, I got to the point where I was doing exactly the thing that I would teach people not to do, when I was helping people with social media, and that is automatically posting a bunch of crap, and not actually being social, not actually using social media to engage with people in a social manner. And I felt really bad about that, but like I said I didn’t do anything to change it, until this week, I finally got rid of the vast majority of the posting times on my calendar on Edgar and I only left the podcast stuff, because I do, the podcast is kind of the core of what I do, and I still want to get it out there, especially the old episodes which I think are really, really good. So, I have left the podcast, that may change but I have removed all the old blog posts that are going out, all the old videos and stuff that just wasn’t relevant. What kind of triggered me doing that was that some old video or comment or something of mine, blog post, had posted on my Facebook page and then I saw someone comment on it, and I thought: oh my God, that’s totally not relevant to what I am doing now, ah, I need to get rid of that. So, I went into Edgar and first I started deleting a lot of stuff and then I thought: no, that’s not what I need to be doing, I need to be just deleting when that content posts. So, like I said that was the second half of my decluttering and I have to say it feels so good, and I feel like I’m moving back towards a more authentic, organic, way of using social media. I actually went on Twitter and posted two updates, comments, stuff, yesterday, that were totally unrelated to content. And I feel like because I was following all the social media experts for so long, and because I was so focussed on using social media to market my business, I got so business-y with it and so automated with it and I just stopped being social and I really, really, look forward to using it for social purposes in the future. And, it just feels better, it feels like a giant weight has been lifted off me because again, I wasn’t comfortable with how I was using social media, by pushing all that content out there. And because I feel like I really liked meeting people on social media, and I really liked using it in that way, and so I am looking forward to going back to that.

Now, another thing that I decluttered, that I haven’t mentioned, is I kind of removed myself from a lot of Facebook groups that I just wasn’t using. I went in and I looked at the list and I thought: if I am not active in this group, why am I in there? I removed myself from a bunch of groups, there are probably some more that I could remove myself from, but I haven’t done it yet. I kind of like to do these things in phases, kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion, getting rid of the stuff that I know isn’t right for me, and leaving the stuff that I am not quite sure about, and then going back and doing another clear out in the future. So, this is something that you might want to do on a regular basis. I think the smartest thing for me at least would be to go through this stuff on a quarterly basis, re-evaluate how I am using social media, and re-evaluate all the people that I am following, so that is something that I would need to get into my system if I decide that’s what I want to do. I do think re-evaluating this stuff on a quarterly basis seems logical and seems something that might work for me. So, think about what might work for you. Is it something you need to do on a monthly basis, a quarterly basis, once a year, twice a year, what works for you? Maybe you just do it once, go though one cycle of it, and see how that feels, and then go with your gut, in terms of when you need to do it again, but maybe put a reminder in your system to let you know to think: do I need to do it again or not? Otherwise time an go by, and it all gets so cluttered, and we get to that point where we feel allergic to social media because we don’t like what’s happened to our social networks, because we haven’t been kind of weeding the garden.

So now that I have done all this decluttering, I think the next step is what do I want to do instead? What do I want to do with social media? And this goes back to posting organic tweets on Twitter, creating more lists of different types of people so I can kind of go through feeds of different lists, and retweet people that I think are tweeting interesting things and make sure that I see the content that I want to see. On Instagram, that’s mostly just sharing podcast episodes, and pictures of my walks, that might change in the future but that’s pretty much all that I have ever done with Instagram, I never got into automatic posts on there, I don’t even know if there are any apps that allow you to do that. And that’s what I think I have liked about Instagram that it is often very fresh content rather than recycled old crap that people are just pushing out there. And Facebook, I am probably going to go through another declutter of the Facebook groups I am in and unfollow some pages and reevaluate my experience there. One, I think it is a chrome plugin that you might find useful for Facebook it is called FBPurity and that can help you completely redesign your Facebook feed, you can do it, so you see all updates, you can do it so you don’t see those coloured backgrounds that I know a lot of people don’t like, you can customise so many things for your Facebook. And I have found that really useful for the times I do go through my feed, to make sure that I see the things that I want to see. So, FB Purity, and I will link to that in the show notes, a word of caution when you go to the FB Purity website it looks like a crappy old website that was designed in 1999, it is really old looking, but it something that I have been using for years and I trust it and I would not see any reason to not use it. I just wanted to let you know that because again I tend to not trust websites that are old and ugly, I don’t know whether that’s right or not, but it definitely makes me think twice about downloading something if their website looks like it was 20 years old.

So that’s kind of my plan moving forwards and I wanted to share these thoughts with you and these things that I am doing, so you can perhaps evaluate how you want to create authentic and organic connections online. I absolutely want to stay in touch with the people I want to stay in touch with and I don’t want their stuff to be crowded out by people and posts and things that I am no longer interested in, or that I am actively trying to stay away from because I am trying to shift my brain from business to writing and from coaching to writing. And for you this may also involve letting go of some of the social networks you are on. As I said earlier, and this is something that I always used to teach when I helped people with social media: you do not need to be on every single network, even if you are using social media to market your business, find the ones you like and focus on that. Do you hate Twitter? Don’t go on Twitter. Do you hate Facebook? Then don’t go there, even though it seems like everyone is on there. Do what feels right for you because when you are using social media in a natural authentic way that feels like fun to you, then it is going to be so much more effective.

So, think about: are there any social networks that you might want to declutter? And, it could just be as much as posting a last post saying: look I am not going to be very active on here, you can find me on here and here and then just let it go. Or it might be more extreme, you might be closing down a Facebook group, I just archived my Facebook group, and moved everything over to Patreon – go with what is right for you. And if what the internet marketing people are saying is right and good and true, and if that doesn’t feel right then don’t do it, just do what feels right for you. And I really believe that when we use these tools more naturally in ways that feel good to us, it is going to be so much more effective. And right now not necessarily using social media to promote my business, because my business is not really happening, because I am focussing on my writing. And I am also not using social media that much to share about my writing. Occasionally I will put an update on how many words I have written on my book, but I am not even doing that strategically, so I am just moving back to using it organically as it feels natural and that’s going to evolve.

So, that’s all for now, I knew this was going to be a slightly shorter episode, because there is not a ton I have to say on this topic, however, it is something that I wanted to share with you because right now the stuff that I am blogging about and sharing about is all about what’s going on for me, and I am doing that because whenever I do these things, talk about this stuff, I get really good feedback from people who are going through the same thing or similar things.

So that is all for now.

Please drop me a line and let me know what you thought about this week’s episode, you can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch. As I said before I would love for you to join me on Patreon, if you head to http://patreon.com/hollyworton you can join me there.

That is all for now, thank you so much for listening and remember to visit: https://www.hollyworton.com/277 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you so much.